In early June, I was in a nice rainy East Coast US city for meetings dealing with particularly thorny issues related to ways the Internet experience is being killed off for regular folks—and for institutions (NGOs) that are promoting free speech and human rights. Over a small breakfast, I sketched in my book some notes about the progression of malware over time. Basically paralleling the development I describe in my site The Social Graph of Malware, malware has gone from simple and juvenile defacement of web sites to become sophisticated and bandwidth-hogging socially-engineered schemes designed to get people to fall for a purchase they didn’t want to make, or just to click a link to enroll their computer in a network of zombies poised to conduct nasty attacks on other people. [Read more…]
The iPhone is an “amateur radio”
Comeon‘ Apple — we all know “my phone has five bars and yet it drops calls all the time.” I call customer support on average once a month about this. They have even given me credits on my bill (not often). They have told me to download and use their app AT&T Mark the Spot to report poor-reception areas. Which I do routinely.
Now that Apple has announced that the reception measurement on the iPhone is incorrect (reading too high by about 2 bars in some cases), I no longer have an excuse. AT&T claims to have 10 towers within a 2-mile radius of my home office, but most of the time 2 or 3 of them are ”down” and besides, in San Francisco, over half of them are “behind a hill” from me so they do me no good. There are probably only 2 or 3 towers that actually give me any coverage in the office here.
But, Apple knew about the +2 bars problem a long time ago. It was reported in 2009. We were all seeing 2 or 3 bars, and then our software was upgraded and we were seeing 5 bars routinely (except when there were none). We customers knew that the iPhone was giving us more bars than it should have. So why did Apple not know this, or not see the change when this happened in the first place?
And Apple was surprised about this?
Any mobile phone is a mobile radio. And amateur radio operators, which we all are these days, know that if you touch (and thus “ground”) the antenna, you cause a change in signal strength.
Pad Computing in Sci-Fi and in Real Life
The iPad immediately led me to think about how tablet computing is portrayed in science fiction. TV and movies – because that’s the only place you actually saw little beasties like these 10 or 20 years ago.[1] Today they’re (literally today) all around the world.[2]
In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”). [Read more…]
Other issues related to balkanization of the Internet
I wrote yesterday about the potential for the Internet to become fragmented and subdivided so that it would be many separate internets rather than a vehicle for open international communication. Traditionally this kind of subdivision is called balkanization, though I called it cantonization because of the current example of the great Chinese firewall [China’s Golden Shield]. What you see as the Internet when you log on in many countries around the world is only a portion of what you’ll see from other locations. There are some other important issues related to this fragmentation of the net. [Read more…]
Google Chinese-language search, Hong Kong, and Internet Cantonization
So the “solution” to providing uncensored Chinese-language search, at least right now (beginning 22 March, 2010), is to have Chinese citizens use google.com.hk (hk==Hong Kong) rather than mainland-based google.cn. I guess it’s a breakthrough idea to do this, since under Hong Kong law, the uncensored search is legal, but of course the arguments going on these days about restrictive access to the Internet have to do with nations trying to restrict the access of their citizens based on physical location. And the location of a server is important because the local authorities can come in and physically shut you down.
But the great firewall is already blocking Google.com.hk content, as would be expected. [Read more…]
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